Maybe someone has written this. So I won’t call it an original idea. Just something I haven’t seen yet that has occurred to me in the past hours.

Something to try to explain the inexplicable: LeBron James and his return to Cleveland.

No one, in sports, goes back to Cleveland. Not if they can help it.

Not to the baseball Indians or the football Browns or the basketball Cavaliers. Not unless they are in some weird place in their careers where one of those teams offers more money to a free agent than any other team, and the economics of it make too much sense. And if a Cleveland team has ever landed a major free agent … I do not recall it.

Otherwise?

Cleveland is the home of losing teams and lost causes, and athletes flee it if they can. None of its teams have won a championship since the Browns won the NFL title in 1964. Most of the time, Cleveland teams are bad. When they aren’t bad, they manage to lose the key game.

Like Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, when closer Jose Mesa couldn’t keep the Marlins from scoring the tying run in the bottom of the ninth of a game they lost in 11. The Indians also lost the 1995 World Series, the first they had played in since 1954 (which the also lost).

The Browns have never played in a Super Bowl. They came painfully close to getting there twice, losing to the Denver Broncos in 1986 (The Drive) and 1987 (The Fumble). If a game is known by one word, and your team lost, yes, it was an excruciating defeat. The original Browns left Cleveland in 1995, and they got another franchise, also the Browns, which is 77-163 since its 1999 debut.

Then there are the Cavaliers, who have played in only one NBA Finals since their founding, in 1970. That was in 2007, when a team featuring LeBron and not a whole lot else (unless you like Zydrunas Ilgauskas) was swept by San Antonio.

Cleveland has lots of issues. We have been told it is gentrifying, making a comeback, and maybe it is, but its image remains that of a Rust Belt capital, down on its luck, which peaked maybe around 1920, where the town’s river, the Cuyahoga, has caught fire several times because it was so polluted, and where the weather, on the shores of Lake Erie, often is miserable.

And now LeBron James goes back to Cleveland.

James is from Akron, and Akron is very much part of the Cleveland media market, so Cleveland is home, in a more general sense.

And “home” clearly mattered to James, who referred to it in very clear terms in his first-person essay, given to Sports Illustrated. It ended with the sentence: “I’m coming home.”

Earlier, he mentioned that he always planned to return to Cleveland, before he was done with basketball. And the introduction goes like this:

“Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up. I sometimes feel like I’m their son. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now.”

Four years ago, of course, was when James was the subject of a 75-minute special called The Decision — in which he said he was taking his talents to South Beach. Miami, that is.

It was a public-relations disaster.

Not only did it set off very personal vituperation in Cleveland, it seems to galvanize public opinion against the Heat, in general, and James, in particular.

For four seasons — though the antipathy faded, slightly, after the first year — NBA fans generally wanted the Heat to lose. And they really wanted to James to lose. The Decision rankled. The notion of three players (Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade before the other two) sitting down and deciding to join up in Miami seemed artificial and somehow not fair. And James had abandoned a benighted city.

As big and imposing as James is on the basketball court, he seemed eventually to be worn down at being The Guy Everyone Wants to Lose.

In Game 1 of the NBA Finals this year, James suffered severe cramps in the overheated San Antonio arena, couldn’t play the final crucial minutes of the game, and the Heat lost. He was trashed, as he often has been the past four years, in this case for not fighting through the pain like everyone else did.

In an interview with ESPN a few days later, LeBron said he was “the easiest target that we have in sports. I’m aware of it. I really am. I believe it.”

In the same story he added how he had stopped consuming media because it was so negative, especially that first season in Miami.

He told ESPN: “I can’t play the game of basketball and live my life on what other people expect me to do or what they think I should do, that doesn’t make me happy. What makes me happy is being able to make plays for my teammates, to be able to represent the name on the back of my jersey. That’s what makes me happy. What everybody else thinks? That doesn’t really matter to me.”

Ah, but I am convinced it did very much matter to him. He had been loved in Cleveland, but he became a national villain, respected but widely unpopular, among basketball fans, most of whom rejoiced that the Spurs defeated the Heat in the NBA Finals, in five games.

Then things got interesting.

On June 22, Savannah James, LeBron’s wife, posted to Instagram a map of Ohio showing Akron, and wrote: “Home sweet home!! The countdown begins!”

Which immediately led to speculation LeBron might return … but, wait. Nobody returns to Cleveland.

On July 1, LeBron opted out of his Heat contract. The theory was that he was going to have his contract done over, allowing the Heat to pursue a stronger supporting cast. But the Cavaliers were described as having a real shot at getting him to return.

Then, today, the SI story broke, and the “home” concept is a real thing.

I think it’s about this:

LeBron James never thought he would be the most-loathed NBA star, but he has been since The Decision.

He suspected that Miami fans liked him well enough, but he was the guy who had come from somewhere else to join up with Wade and Bosh. He lived in Miami, but it was never home, and those fans were temporary fans.

He was tired of being the heavy, and I guess his thinking went something like this:

He could go home to the Cavaliers and be a hero in Cleveland till the end of time. He could fail in Cleveland. Wouldn’t matter. He could get hurt in his first minute of his first game. Wouldn’t matter.

Simply by returning to Cleveland, the most godforsaken sports town in America, James is a hero there. Forever.

He doesn’t how have to worry about being loved. He has that pocket of northwest Ohio that will love him unconditionally from this day forward.

And, truth be told, many of the the rest of us are a little verklempt over this, too.

Sure, he’s getting a maximum contract (expected to be about $22 million this season), but he could have gotten that anywhere in the NBA.

He went back to Cleveland to get it.

And he stuck the landing, to borrow a gymnastics term. The word of his move didn’t come like a sledgehammer to the head, on national TV, as it did four years ago. It was announced by SI. And LeBron has yet to say a word to electronic media, saying only “it’s time to get to work” as well as saying the Cavaliers can’t be expected to win a championship straight off — as opposed to the bombastic “not three, not four, not five” NBA titles he predicted would be won in Miami.

This time, it was a classy move by a guy many fans are now going to be reevaluating. Some of us who haven’t been to Cleveland in years (or at all) will find ourselves rooting for the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James.

He went home, I believe, because he wanted to be where he had been loved and would be loved again. And in the process, he became more appealing than he has ever been.